Product Review – Ryset Fruit Protection Bags

Are birds and possums raiding your fruit trees and vines just before your fruit ripens? Many gardeners try netting the whole tree, but that can be too difficult. If you can’t net the whole tree or vine, there’s a simpler solution – just net the fruit!

Ryset Australia offers a range of pest deterrent and bird netting products, including these wonderful Fruit Protection Bags, which I was given by a local garden nursery to review. Each bag is a large 30 cm x 30 cm (12” x 12”) drawstring bag made from commercial insect-exclusion netting, designed to slip over the fruit to be protected. The mesh is fine enough to keep insect pests out as well. They come in a bag of ten, and each bag is large enough to protect most fruit and vine crops.

The top and bottom edges are securely stitched, and the drawstring is made of black plastic cord that is not affected by water and is easy to untie.

As you can see, the mesh is quite fine, so it will also prevent insects from reaching your fruit, including fruit flies, which are common pests in subtropical and tropical climates. As an added benefit, fruit bats cannot get tangled in the fine mesh either. It’s perfectly safe to use where they may be present.

To use, just slip the bag over a bunch of fruit or berries (such as grapes), pull the drawstring firmly to close the top, and tie it with a shoelace knot.

Where can you purchase this product? Ryset is a wholesaler that supplies the retail garden and professional agricultural industries, so for home gardeners, the best place to purchase Ryset’s products is your local garden nursery.

In Melbourne, Bulleen Art & Garden Nursery sells a range of Ryset netting and fruit protection products. For online purchases across Australia, you can also order from The Diggers Club or Greenharvest.

Product assessment

Ryset’s Fruit Protection Bags are an affordable solution for protecting fruit from pests such as birds and possums. The insect-exclusion mesh from which the bags are constructed is quite strong, and you definitely can’t tear the material by hand.

This solution is very cost-effective, so having lots of individual bags is not a concern. The Ryset Fruit Protection Bags come in packs of ten for around five dollars, so they’re only fifty cents each! I’ve used mine over many seasons, and they are still in excellent condition. Since they’re out in the elements only during fruiting season, they should last many years.

So far, I have tested this product on apples, grapes, persimmons and plums. You can easily wrap the bag around a bunch of apples, fitting nearly half a dozen in each bag if the apples are close enough.

When it comes to protecting grapes, I’ve found that birds are quite intelligent. If you don’t pull the drawstring tightly and leave it fairly loose, they will pick out the grapes one by one, letting the bag slip down to reveal more grapes! After discovering this and properly tightening the drawstrings, I managed to cover around 50 large bunches of grapes and stopped the birds from getting to them.

With my grapevines, I also discovered that rats and mice can climb very well. One of my grapevines runs under the eaves of the roof, around 3m (10’) high, screening my west wall from the hot summer afternoon sun. I spotted a pair of rats and some mice climbing all the way up. They also chewed through the fruit protection bags. Rodents can chew through most things, but luckily they only ruined two before I resorted to other solutions to control them…

In my garden, we have possums, fruit bats and birds, including rainbow lorikeets (small parrots). The possums and parrots did not try to get through the fruit bags; their presence was enough to deter them. My dwarf almond and loquat trees were always stripped clean by rainbow lorikeets, and using the fruit protection bags saved the whole crop last season.

Working part-time in a garden nursery, I speak to many gardeners, and one person told me that when the rats chewed holes through the fruit bags, the opportunistic possums forced their way through the holes, enlarging them to reach the fruit inside. I guess nothing is foolproof when you’re dealing with intelligent animals capable of learning.

I’m sold on this product. I’ve stocked up on these Fruit Protection Bags because they’re cheap and reusable, and I cover my fruit and grapes before they’re mature enough to attract the garden pests that seem to be increasing in number year after year!

In Permaculture, we’re always focussed on energy efficiency and minimising the use of non-renewable resources. As a handy tip, here’s a Permaculture way to use this product! When you have trees that crop at different times throughout the year, you can simply move the bags from tree to tree. As you harvest from one tree, the bags become available to cover newly growing fruit on the next tree. This means you don’t need as many of these nifty bags as you might think, a point appreciated by sustainable gardeners out there.

I’ve also found that these bags are great at ‘catching fruit’ that naturally falls from the tree, minimising waste. It’s easy to see a ripe apple at the bottom of the bag, hanging from the branch, preserved in pristine condition and ready to eat! When fruit hits the ground, it’s often damaged, and when it falls unnoticed, it’s usually attacked by snails overnight as it lies on the ground.

Incidentally, if these bags don’t seem large enough for your requirements, Ryset also makes a 30cm wide x 90cm (1’ x 3’) long sleeve with drawstring ends on each side to cover whole branches. They also make preformed tree covers, 2.4m x 2.8m, with a side door, all made of the same material. Stay tuned. I’ll also assess these products in upcoming reviews.

In summary, Ryset Fruit Protection Bags are a very cost-effective and sustainable way to protect fruit from pests such as birds and possums! They’re reusable, easy to deploy and remove. They also protect fruit from insect pests, making them versatile and delivering multiple benefits to gardeners. These great little bags have now earned their place in my range of tools for protecting my produce from pests, and I wholeheartedly recommend them!

Deep Green rating for the “Ryset Fruit Protection Bags” is 5 stars!

If you are interested in submitting a product for review, please contact us via email at deep_green@optusnet.com.au , thanks!